


Like Rebel Diamonds

by tentacledicks



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Ambiguous/Open Ending, F/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:53:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26206735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/pseuds/tentacledicks
Summary: “West,” you say after a second, starting to move forward again. If you heard that, so did every undead thing in this city.“Maybe four blocks,” Cora confirms, moving to the opposite side of the street as she keeps pace with you. Safer not to be in the open. You don’t know who’s shooting or why yet.Daylight makes the zombies slow, and you figure that’s the only reason you’re able to get to the scene. There’s a man up on top of a bus, pistol in his hands and a rifle slung over his back, his gun trained on the body of one of the things you’ve privately called a ‘leaper’. Because they jump. Dad called them Deltas, because they were the fourth variant he ran into, so that’s always the name you use out loud.
Relationships: Cora Harper & Female Ryder | Sara & Liam Kosta, Liam Kosta/Female Ryder | Sara
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: Alternate Universe Exchange 2020





	Like Rebel Diamonds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ziskandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziskandra/gifts).



You haul yourself up and over an abandoned car, the paint starting to flake and rust after years out in the elements, and hear Cora grunt very quietly as she follows you. It’s a warm morning gearing up to be a hot day and you’re already sweating under the patchwork of kevlar and denim of your bodysuit, but that’s the kind of trade-off you have to make these days. Running around in cotton might be cooler, but cotton doesn’t do anything against human teeth. That’s one of the first things you figured out.

The empty space to your right is like an accusation and the empty space in front of you even worse. It’s been a bad year, maybe your worst year yet, and considering what happened during the initial outbreak, that’s a pretty tall bar to leap over. At least the doctors think Scott might walk again someday, if they can find or manufacture a good prosthetic with the limited resources the Initiative has left. But your Dad…

“It’s going to be hell hauling anything out of the city centre,” Cora mutters to your left, her rifle up and trained on the dark spaces between buildings. 

“We’ll make it work,” you say very softly in response, your own handgun pointing straight ahead. Sometimes the threats out here aren’t subtle at all.

Asphalt and concrete crumble under your feet as you move forward but the cities are always eerily quiet. All the disaster movies you remember told you that wildlife would reclaim human spaces, but that never happened here. Outside, sure. But the hordes in the city trample green things, tear up new shoots and gnaw frantically on any roots that break through the ground under your feet. You’d almost feel bad for the zombies if you didn’t know what they’d do if those walls ever came down.

You’ve been called crazy before, all of you. Most of humanity figured out quick that small communities deep in the wilderness were the best way to survive, far from the population centres with their overwhelming number of corpses. But Jien Garson believes, like your Mom believed, like you believe, that the only future for humanity is one that comes with progress. There’s a cure, you’re sure of it. Mom died for that possibility and you won’t rest until you find the magic key to unlock that future you’re all dreaming of.

And with the walls around the city fully built, the Initiative is safe. Safe-ish. Safe enough to tentatively start farming on a larger scale, safe enough that there were people beginning to retrofit factories for renewable energy, safe enough that you don’t always turn off the lights and go silent when night falls. Most of the zombies are trapped inside and the ones left out are easy to pick off from the guard towers lifting high around the Initiative’s borders.

It took years. A lot of people died. But it’s almost easy to think it was all worth it when you hear stories about the other cities, the ones that _are_ overgrown and you can’t get within twenty miles of without losing your life.

But when it really comes down to it, the only thing that will make it worth it will be that cure. You wake up every morning, looking at the empty space where Dad should be, and remind yourself that Ryders don’t quit. Mom believed. Dad believed. You have to believe that there’s something more than pure survival left for humanity too.

A faint gunshot breaks the eerie silence of the city and you freeze, Cora going stiff beside you.

“West,” you say after a second, starting to move forward again. If you heard that, so did every undead thing in this city.

“Maybe four blocks,” Cora confirms, moving to the opposite side of the street as she keeps pace with you. Safer not to be in the open. You don’t know who’s shooting or why yet.

Daylight makes the zombies slow, and you figure that’s the only reason you’re able to get to the scene. There’s a man up on top of a bus, pistol in his hands and a rifle slung over his back, his gun trained on the body of one of the things you’ve privately called a ‘leaper’. Because they jump. Dad called them Deltas, because they were the fourth variant he ran into, and that’s always the name you use out loud.

There’s a few of the Alphas—the basic ones, the ones everyone knows about—clawing at the sides of the bus, but they’re sluggish and drunk in their movements. They’re not meant to be active when the sun is up, not like some of the other variants, and a machete was a better weapon for them during the day than a gun, but Deltas are fast and they’re only easier to see when the lights are on. You can’t really blame someone for shooting one of _those_ , all things considered.

Still.

“What’s the move, Ryder?” Cora asks, voice low. She was Dad’s second in command, technically should’ve led the squad after he died, but the squad is just the two of you and she told you once that she looks for orders more than she does solutions. Leadership isn’t a comfortable mantle for you, but you guess that’s just one more discomfort after half a decade of them.

The smart thing to do would be to leave this guy. It’s not a short trek through the city, but he’s also not the first one to come through one of the gates and try his luck rather than waste almost a week walking around the perimeter. He might even be a scavenger like you, just working on his own behalf instead of for the Initiative. You _should_ leave him, sneak off, and let him draw all the hordes so you stay safe.

You bite your lip, admit that you don’t have the coldness your Dad did, and say, “I count eight. Do you think we can slice and dice before they stop paying attention to him?”

“We’ve had worse odds.” Cora gives you a smile that’s more confident than she probably feels, swinging her rifle up behind her shoulders and securing it. “I go right, you go left?”

“See you on the flipside,” you agree, holstering your pistol and pulling the bowie knife out of your belt instead, yanking a baseball bat off your pack with your other hand and running with light steps towards your chosen target. Best way to kill a zombie was destroying the connection to the nervous system. Bullet through the eye, bat to the temple, knife through the neck, it didn’t really matter. The undead brain just had to stop working.

You’ve gotten really, really good at caving in skulls since the first outbreak.

It’s always dangerous, even with you at an advantage in the sunlight. You keep one zombie off with the tip of your bat as you slam your blade through the vertebrae of another, then swing around and brain it as soon as you have a hand free. A third tries to take a chunk out of you as you retrieve your knife, earning a knife through its temple for its efforts. 

The guy you’re trying to rescue takes off the fourth zombie’s head with a fire axe, then gives you a grin brighter than the sun. There’s freckles on his dark skin, and he’s got pieces of hockey armor strapped to his arms and shoulders, a shotgun swinging at his hip. And now that you’re looking, you can see _another_ handgun holstered at his thigh, pocketknife behind the one he’d pulled on the Delta, extra clips strapped to his backpack, like he’s some kind of walking armory. It’s… a really excessive setup just for a little salvage.

“Four down,” you say belatedly, flushing when you realize you’ve been staring at him. He has _really_ pretty eyes, and you’re not sure what to do with that.

“Five on this side. There was one trapped under the bus,” Cora says as she rounds the back, giving the stranger a cool up-and-down that reminds you she saw combat long before she started running salvage missions with you.

“You guys are lifesavers. I almost didn’t see the ambusher until it was too late, and then the gunshot…” He trails off, rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment. You haven’t heard a British accent since the cable networks went down, mostly because Dad never stopped working long enough to join in on the movie nights in the community, and you think his is maybe the coolest one you’ve ever heard. “My name’s Liam, by the way. Are you guys from the Andromeda Initiative?”

You blink, then blink again, then turn your brain off the sexy accent and back on to work. Cora looks like she’s trying to decide if she wants to laugh or strangle you. “Uh, yeah. My name’s Sara, that’s Cora, we’re on the retrieval team. You were coming to join up?”

“That was the plan,” Liam says, jerking his head south. “I ran into a nest back that way and went for high ground when that ambusher caught up to me. There’s not much worthwhile that way that I could see.”

“We should keep moving. We were headed east anyways.” You wipe your bat off on your jeans, slipping it through the loop on your own backpack, then start trotting away from the bus. The bowie knife is a little easier to clean, but you remind yourself to actually oil and sharpen it when you bunk down for the knife. It didn’t slide as cleanly through muscle as it should have.

“Why come through the city?” Cora asks as she falls into place behind you. Liam takes up that empty spot on the right and it feels correct in a way that also feels like a betrayal of Scott.

“Faster,” Liam says, hooking his axe onto his backpack and drawing his pistol again. “I got impatient, which was stupid of me. And I thought maybe I could save a couple people if I came through. Figures I’d get rescued instead, huh?”

“You make a pretty good damsel,” you say before you can stop yourself. And then you feel yourself flush from your cheeks to your shoulders, not helping the sweaty awfulness of the heat outside at _all_.

Liam laughs, a soft chuckle that makes you feel even more awkward, but he doesn’t tell you to fuck off. So he’s pretty cool in your books, and since Cora snorts softly too, you think she might agree. Which would be nice. You need a third, now that Scott’s stuck back home. And you maybe want your third to be someone you’re not related to, for once.

You stay quiet for a few blocks after that, the three of you slipping between abandoned cars and worn buildings as you make your way to a pharmaceutical company’s corporate offices. You know the building because it was one of the first Dad had cleared before the walls went up, back when you thought there was a lab underneath. There isn’t, but Harry thinks that there might be records there relating back to the beginning of the outbreak. You and Cora were supposed to pick up other supplies too—needles and plastic gloves, bandages, some other nonperishable but hard to manufacture first aid items—but the real reason you’re here are those records.

There’s a few zombies passively standing in stasis out in front of the building, clustered around the doors. You draw your bowie knife, watch as Liam pulls off his axe and Cora draws her machete, then silently dispose of them before they can wake up enough to be a problem. Daylight in the city isn’t safe, but it is pretty easy. Night time is when you’re going to have to stay sharp.

“Where would they keep records?” you ask as you enter the cool interior of the offices. The marble floors are cracked, a few of the ceiling panels hanging, and the lights haven’t worked for years you’re betting. You tug a flashlight off your belt, flicking it on, and you hear Cora do the same with her rifle’s light a second later. 

Liam mutters something under his breath, then makes a soft, triumphant noise as a third halo of light joins yours, a little dimmer and a little more yellow. “Got it. Uh, what kind of records?”

“R&D, products under development, anything that might be linked to the outbreak.” You stop at the receptionist’s desk, shining your flashlight over the directory. Nothing is helpfully listed as SUPER SECRET ZOMBIE VIRUS RESEARCH which is a problem.

“Basement, maybe? Isn’t that where most of these companies keep their physical records? Or d’you think the finance department might be a better place to check?” Liam’s light bounces over the hallways, cutting past overturned chairs and dusty tables.

“Why the finance department?” Cora asks, her own light tracking more smoothly across the opposite side of the room. There isn’t anything in this building to draw the undead, but none of you take risks anymore.

“They have to keep records for audits, right? So if there was something, they’d have an invoice or something, wouldn’t they?” Liam sounds perfectly reasonable, and you can’t really fault his logic. It’s _not_ just because he’s cute, you tell yourself firmly. He does have a good idea.

It’s a little because he’s cute with his good ideas. But if you don’t tell anyone, no one will know, so it’s fine.

“Sounds as good as any place I’d think to check,” Cora says, agreeing with your internal argument without realizing. “Where’s finance, Ryder?”

“Fifth floor. Can you see where the stairwells are? I remembered how to find the building, but I wasn’t with Dad’s team when they cleared it out the first time. Scott and I were on grocery duty then.” You turn away from the desk, grateful that the darkness is probably hiding whatever face you might be making.

“Elevator's to the left,” she says, and Liam cuts in a second later to point out the sign for the stairwell. You take point again, making sure the hallway is clear before you kick the door open; the old fire escape alarms are dead by now, or maybe they weren’t actually enabled when the building was abandoned. Either way, your ascent is in silence, Liam at your heels as Cora brings up the rear.

The fifth floor is warmer than the first floor, and you figure out why pretty fast—the windows on the east side have all been shattered open, debris and pieces of office furniture littering the cubicles and conference rooms on that side. The sun beats down into the open rooms, wind whistling as it gusts past the shards of glass, and it looks like someone tried to run plywood across the gap between the pharmaceutical company and the parking garage next door at some point.

You nudge the rotting plywood with a toe, watching the splinters shatter and fall close to fifty feet down to the pavement below. Yeah, that bridging plan probably didn’t hold up so well after a week or two.

“What was the logic here?” you wonder out loud, looking at a dry erase board that’s smeared and graffitied over. Survivors, writing out their last words. And underneath the sharpie, there’s some old expo markers, leaving a list of meeting times and a chipper reminder to enjoy the long holiday weekend.

“Someone else who had the same idea we did?” Cora’s voice is dry, her attention towards the dark interior of the building. Right. You’re looking for records, and these offices are too ruined by weather and exposure to have much.

“Bit eerie, isn’t it?” Liam murmurs as you head deeper, shining your flashlight over the names outside of doors. Lots of managerial offices. Accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll. There’s dust and bits of leaf litter even down here, but the further away from the broken windows you get, the more like a time capsule the offices look. There’s photos on the desks, invoices stacked up next to a filing cabinet, someone’s old coffee thermos left behind with the intention to retrieve it on Tuesday.

You remember the first months of the outbreak, when everyone thought it would be normal. That was before the dead started rising again, back when the only horror was wondering how many people might survive the disease. All things considered, the most virulent part of the virus was the shortest, and you’re all lucky that it stopped being airborne as soon as it did. It’s just that the second phase was the one that ended the world.

That was the phase that killed Mom, down in a lab studying the spread of the virus and trying to find a cure. No one was prepared for it then.

You find the internal audit department and the office of the CFO, side by side. There’s no power to the building so you’re _super_ fucked if they kept all their records electronic, but you nod for Liam and Cora to take the audit department while you nudge the CFO’s office door open, flashlight held flush to the pistol you drew. It’s empty, just a computer on a desk and a wall of cabinets, the bookshelves on the other wall packed with law books and publications.

The file cabinets are locked, but a couple hard tugs are enough to break them open. It’s not like you care about hiding your looting after all. There’s not much of interest though, mostly closing documents and journals, old financials and investor reports. You find the oldest stuff and estimate where the newest stuff might be, hunting for any reference to intangibles and the R&D department. There’s got to be something in here, even if it’s just telling you to go to a different office on the other side of the city. There’s got to be.

You find the third quarter close financials and pull out all the papers that seem to correspond. A lot of it is business stuff that kind of goes over your head—you and Scott had been going into your last year of highschool when it all hit the fan and you’d been thinking of an engineering degree, not a business one—but you figure out where the section on research and development is after a few minutes of skimming. There’s nothing concrete but there is _something_ , references to the outbreak and potential vaccine research.

“Perfect,” you breathe, very softly. Papers in hand, you step out of the office and head for the internal audit offices, knocking on the door in a shave-and-a-haircut pattern before opening the door. “Any luck?”

“Still in the second quarter,” Liam says glumly, crosslegged on the floor and surrounded by boxes of papers, his backpack shoved to the side. Cora’s seated at the desk behind him, her rifle propped up against the cubicle wall as she flips through the journals for the period.

“Move on to the third quarter, that’s where it starts showing up in their investor reports.” You wave your papers victoriously, then swing your own backpack off and dig out the plastic folder you intend to stuff them in. “If we can find out where their research labs are, we can pitch an excursion to one of them to Director Garson. She wants a vaccine as bad as we do.”

“You aren’t going to head there right off?” Liam looks up, head cocked and a small frown furrowing his eyebrows.

You waver for a second, because you _want_ to. If you find something, anything that points you in the direction of a cure or some way to make sure people don’t have to be afraid anymore, you want to be there first. You want to dig it out of the rubble of that lab with your bare hands, want to haul it back to your brother and see his eyes light up when he realizes that it wasn’t all a waste, want to shove it in the faces of everyone at the Initiative who saw Alec Ryder die and let their hope die with him. You _want_ , with a fire hot enough to sear your skin off from the inside.

But it’s not enough to want, and you can’t be stupid about this. Stupid gets people killed. And you like Liam, a lot, so you really, really don’t want to get him killed before you can show him the amazing thing the Initiative has built.

“Not today,” you temporize, zipping your bag back up. “If we find something, and it’s in walking distance, maybe we’ll try and reach it tomorrow. Just to see. But today, once we’re done here, we’re going to hit some of the pharmacies and check for first aid supplies. That’s what we were authorized to come in here for in the first place.”

Liam looks between you both, then grins slowly. “So this is an unauthorized search for the cure?”

“Alec always believed it could be found, and he was the Pathfinder. We have prior authorization.” Cora manages to say that straight faced, then glances at you with a tiny smirk. She’s _so_ much better at rules lawyering than you.

“So let’s find the location of that research lab and figure out where we’re going in the morning,” you say, reaching for another box of papers and starting to dig through it. And if you’re thinking about how Liam smiles with a flutter in your stomach, at least you’ve got something else to focus on instead.

It takes a while for you to find anything of worth, even with all three of you focusing in the right places. You can’t afford to check every single possible location they might have started research, and this company had labs all over the country. If you need to go to one of the coasts, that’s a trip of a couple months at least and no Initiative support—you need to know for _sure_ where it is before you even think of a journey like that.

The sun isn’t streaming through the broken windows on the eastern side by the time you find something concrete. The lab isn’t inside the city but a three or four hour drive outside of it; that’s a trip of a couple days at most, and it’s super doable. If you get enough supplies to tide the Initiative over for a while, you’ll be able to argue for your chance to go there with Cora and Liam in tow. As long as you do your job, no one can fault you for following up on the things Dad thought were important.

You have all the corresponding paperwork secured in your bag as the three of you head downstairs again, checking every dark corner and closed door for zombies as you do. Liam talks about the kinds he’s seen, the Deltas he calls ambushers and a kind you’ve never spotted that grew secondary limbs to more easily scale buildings and trees. You and Cora talk about Dad’s classification system, rudimentary though it was, and warn him about the Bravos that are like walls of muscle and the Charlies that hide in the sewers and basements with their elongated arms and spiked tongues. She mentions the kind you call the Echo, the one that killed your Dad, and Liam shudders in revulsion over the kind of zombie that can pretend to be human until it’s too late.

It’s not a very nice conversation, but you have fun with it. Liam makes it easier to have fun with it, telling stories about his old search and rescue team and the small group of survivors they ferried to safe haven, the traveler he talked to that clued him into the Initiative’s existence, the hilarious time he fell down a shallow ravine and had to climb up through blackberry brambles to reach his pack again. He winks at you a couple times when he’s retelling it and you manage to respond without resembling a tomato so you’re doing pretty damn well, you think.

Most of the pharmacies are picked clean, but you anticipated that. You head for the other businesses around them too, look in employee break rooms and cannibalize the first aid kits stored there. Liam finds a pharmacy where the stock room was blocked off by a fallen shelf, and when you yank it out of the way, there’s a veritable treasure trove of bandages, antibiotic creams, and sealed bottles of disinfectants. It more than justifies your excursion earlier and your choice to save Liam when it would’ve been easier to leave him behind.

You feel like maybe things are going to be okay after all.

Finding a place to bunker down for the evening is a little harder. There’s apartment blocks in this part of the city, but apartments are absolute death traps and most of them have zombies lingering in the homes that once belonged to them. Safer to try for a business instead, but most of the businesses have been busted open and picked clean, leaving them open for any size of horde come through. The three of you consider and discard a couple of office buildings that you can’t properly clear, a strip mall where the first three stores clearly have slumbering zombies in them, a department store where the pitch black interior gives you weird vibes. Cora suggests trying to hole up in one of the pharmacies, but even the best of your options there leaves you all feeling uncomfortably pinned in.

You find a grocery store where the second floor is reserved for management’s offices and easy to defend, and after calling for a vote, the three of you settle in at the top. The windows on one side of the building look over a fire escape for one of the apartment blocks, then curve around the corner so you have a good view of the parking lot. As the sun sets, Liam and Cora break into the MREs that you brought, courtesy of Dad’s hypervigilant planning, and you watch the first zombies starting to fill the parking lot as they wake up and begin to wander.

In the early days, during the initial period of the second phase, people came up with a lot of names. Shamblers, which was only accurate during the day. Walkers, which always struck you as way too AMC to be worth a damn. ‘Poor neighbors’ as Jien Garson had joked once, when the wall had been around the Initiative instead of the city. But in the end, if it groaned like a zombie and moaned like a zombie, it was definitely a zombie. Your only concession to weird euphemisms is letting your Dad’s system of naming variants stand, but no one in the Initiative remembers to call the hordes of common zombies Alphas. It just doesn’t flow off the tongue easily.

Your flashlight is taped on the railing of the second floor, pointed down the stairs. None of you want to risk drawing attention by keeping more lights on than that, but you absolutely want some kind of warning before anything sneaks up on you.

“So,” you say, getting comfortable against your backpack, “who wants to take first watch?”

“Fight you for it, I’m always at my best in the early evening,” Liam says, his grin gleaming in the darkness. There’s just enough light for you to see the curve of his cheek and the way his rifle sits in his hands and you kind of want to know what it would be like to have those hands on you instead.

“Sounds good to me,” Cora says, nudging you when you don’t agree immediately because you’re too busy trying to commit Liam’s face to memory. “Ryder gets last watch, because she’s a freakish morning person.”

“Wow, okay, miss ‘does push ups for fun to wake up’, you literally have no room to talk.” You elbow her back and don’t miss the way she waggles her eyebrows. She’s _totally_ picked up on the flirting, and since Cora’s been something not quite like a sister, not quite like an acquaintance for most of your life, that’s a terrifying thought.

Liam laughs, and you think your Dad might have liked him. You know Scott will. You can’t wait to introduce them, because you want Liam to like Scott too, want him to see all the pieces of you that everyone else does and choose you anyways.

And then a car alarm goes off in the parking lot.

You swear and scramble upright as you grab your pistol. Cora’s right beside you, flipping the light on her rifle and moving into position at the window, but Liam’s already halfway down the stairs and aiming for the doors. He doesn’t know your protocol or your training and you realize that it’s going to get him killed. “Liam!”

He looks up, the gleam of your flashlight shining over the whites of his eyes, but you don’t get a chance to warn him before the Bravo comes through the front doors like a truck.

It doesn’t even look like a man anymore, a writhing mass of flesh and muscle that crushes and destroys everything in its path. Liam opens fire on it, which is optimistic of him, because the only one you ever killed was with gasoline and an old grenade your Dad kept for sentimental reasons. You shout his name again but you don’t know if he can hear you over the gunfire, his and Cora’s out the window as she tries to clear a path, knowing it’s futile with the sun down no matter what.

You skid down the stairs, train your gun on wine section across the room, and open fire. One bottle shatters, then another, and then what you wanted to happen does, the bottom row of a precarious wine pyramid collapsing under the sudden force. It’s loud, almost as loud as the gun, and it catches the Bravo’s attention just as Liam runs out of bullets in his magazine.

“Wh—” he starts to say, but you grab his arm and start yanking.

“You can’t kill it, just _run!_ ” You sprint up the stairs, your flashlight making your shadows jump and wobble, Liam just behind you as he pops the empty magazine out and straps it to his chest. All of your attention is on him, on making sure he stays safe, and you’re blinded by your own light anyways. It’s sloppy work, and you should know better by now.

You don’t see the Delta that slips up the side of the room, readying itself on the shelf of stale bread. Liam does.

“Fuck!” he shouts, shoving you forward right at it leaps. He doesn’t get a chance to say more before you’re both in the middle of fighting something that’s trying to kill you when neither of you can afford to shoot it. It swipes at him viciously as you yank your knife out, and you think you might be able to sever the spinal cord before it can turn around but its head snakes back right as you—

The Bravo slams into the foot of the stairs with an inhuman roar of outrage, cinderblock crunching ominously under the force of its weight. Liam manages to get his pistol out and fires two shots through the Delta’s legs. It screeches, letting go of your arm, and you slam your knife through its eye and twist until the screams stop.

No time. You leave the knife behind, scrambling up the stairs as the Bravo roars again, hoping desperately that your arm isn’t broken. It hurts, all the way to the bone, and if it’s broken then you might be out of commission for the night. Maybe forever, if you can’t find a way out of this situation and _fast_.

“Ryder!” Cora calls from the far side of the upstairs offices, the windows shattered by the butt of her rifle as she sweeps the last shards out of the frame. “We have to jump! There’s an apartment with an open window three floors up, it’s our best bet!”

Apartments are a death trap, but so is here. It sounds like the Bravo has figured out how to climb and you don’t have long before it catches up to you. You don’t hesitate, holstering your gun and climbing into the window, calculating the distance before taking a leap of faith.

You gasp with pain when your arm hits the railing, but you manage to scramble into the fire escape anyways, bolting up the stairs and forcing yourself not to look back. They can make the jump if you can. You didn’t save Liam’s life for him to get nervy over a twenty foot drop, not even one that might end in a horde of zombies. You need to reach that apartment, clear it like the recon specialist you are, and regroup.

Dad trained you better than this.

You find the open window and slip through it, drawing your gun when you realize you left your bat back in the grocery store. It’s a bedroom, abandoned and filled with debris, the stale scent of animal droppings and dust filling the air. You check under the bed, under the desk, in the closet and then the bathroom, then finally creak the bedroom door open and check the living room as well. All clear.

The front door locks, which is good. When you open it, most of the hallway floor has fallen out, leaving this apartment inaccessible. Even better, the doors for the apartments across the hall are open, letting you peek into them and check for any nasty surprises. Secure in the knowledge that nothing will be coming from this direction tonight, you shut the door and lock it.

Liam’s made it into the bedroom when you swing back, and Cora’s climbing through the window. She has her pack, which is good, but yours and his are still downstairs. Maybe you’ll be able to retrieve it in the morning. Maybe. But you don’t think the odds are good.

When Liam turns to look at you, there’s a wet gleam of blood on his cheek, and your heart stops.

“Oh fuck,” you say, reaching forward. “Liam, your face.”

Cora’s head snaps around as Liam lifts a hand, wincing as he touches his brow. There’s a gash there, like fingernails raked over his skin or a piece of debris caught his temple, and you can’t remember which it would have been. It’s an open wound, which is bad enough. It’s an open wound from a zombie attack, which is so much worse.

“Well, shit,” he says, looking dazed and upset and almost as afraid as you are. And then he looks up at you, and looks down at your arm, and you realize that he’s not the only possible threat in this room right now. “Did it break skin?”

“Sara, what the fuck happened on the stairs?” Cora asks, the barrel of her rifle pointed at the ground but still ready to swing up. You can’t even fault her for that one. If you turn, she won’t have much of a head start, trapped up here with the both of you and the screaming horde below.

“Uh, a leaper—a Delta—I don’t know if it’s what got Liam or if it was the Bravo breaking the wall. It bit me, but that’s why we have kevlar, right?” Except your arm hurts a lot, now that you’re thinking about it, so you carefully pull your jacket off, holding your arm under the rifle’s light. The shape of teeth is indelibly marked on your skin, the bruises already blackening and just enough red that you can’t be sure it hadn’t broken through.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Cora says. But she doesn’t shoot you, not right away, and you get to stare at that bite and wonder how everything went so wrong, so fast. You wanted to introduce Liam to Scott. You wanted—

“So now what?” Liam asks. He doesn’t sound excited anymore. He sounds like he wants to lay down and sleep for a week, or maybe take a dirt nap instead, and you wonder if he planned for cremation or something else to prevent this possibility once upon a time.

The rifle is still pointed at the grubby apartment carpet, its reflected light curving over Cora’s throat as she swallows. Her eyes are bright and wet when they meet yours, and you remember that Dad had been a lot like a father to her too, that she’d been there when he’d died for you. For both of you. This isn’t how things were supposed to go.

“I’m going to go sleep on the couch,” she says, not needing to point out that a watch was meaningless now. “I’m going to block off the door, and in the morning—”

“We’ll know one way or another,” you say softly, seeing the way she nods jerkily before leaving. She takes the pack with her, and you kind of wish she didn’t, just because you want to bandage up that cut on Liam’s forehead before it can bleed everywhere. But you get it. No point in wasting medical supplies if he turns. No reason to risk losing all of their supplies, instead of just the two packs they’d lost already.

There’s a dull thump as she knocks something over in front of the bedroom door. You walk over to the window and shut it, listening as more thumps follow. Hopefully she doesn’t need to use the bathroom at any point, because you’re pretty sure she just locked you in with the only one. That’s assuming there’s any running water left.

You blink away the tears that want to fall, forcing your brain off the mundane path it wants to chase as a way to ignore the reality encroaching on the fantasy you’d been building. Sara Ryder was going to find the vaccine, save the world, make her parents’ sacrifices meaningful and turn things around. Maybe find a romance along the way. It was going to be amazing.

“Hey,” Liam says from the bed. He’s fully dressed still, but he pulled the soiled top covers off and piled them on the floor, leaving the mostly okay sheets alone. His arms are open, and you take the invitation as it’s meant, crawling into them. Both of you have your handguns still, armed and ready, but cuddling like this, neither of you will have the chance to use it before it’s too late.

“You know, I really liked you,” you say, your cheek against his shoulder.

“Yeah,” he breathes, “I really liked you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> MCD is mostly there on Alec's behalf, even if it's canon, because it's kind of a pall over the whole fic, but since the ending _is_ ambiguous, I decided better safe than sorry. 
> 
> Author hat off, I do like to think Liam and Sara live and get out with a really scary cautionary tale about Why We Don't Go Into The City Unprepared, but if you want to read it as fully tragic, feel free! I left it open for a reason, and absolutely loved the amount of room you left for me to write with! Your likes combined with the AU tag hit me with a surge of inspiration. <3


End file.
